Very often when I leave a place of worship, the first impression I have of
the so-called 'outside world' is how small it is -- how puny its politics,
paltry its appetites, squint-eyed its interests. I have just spent an hour
or so with friends reorienting myself in the realities of the world -- the
huge sweep of salvation and the minute particularities of holiness -- and I
blink my eyes in disbelief that so many are willing to live in such reduced
and cramped conditions. But after a few hours or days, I find myself
getting used to it and going along with its assumptions. And then some
pastor or priest calls me back to reality with 'Let us worship God', and I
get it straight again, see it whole.
Every call to worship is a call into the Real World. You'd think that by
this time in my life I wouldn't need to be called anymore. But I do. I
encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the Eurcharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism , not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am."
-- Eugene Peterson
